A 418-page education reform recommendation that took academics 18 months to prepare, has sparked controversy over 15 hallucinated citations, undermining credibility.
A 418-page document (released in August 2025) on a 10-year plan for Newfoundland and Labrador’s Education Accord has drawn controversy last week (13 Sep 2025) after journalists and educators identified at least 15 fake citations in it.
This has sparked concerns over academic integrity and the misleading use of technology in policymaking. The document is the culmination of 18 months’ work by professors at Memorial University’s Faculty of Education, alongside Education Minister Bernard Davis, backed by 110 recommendations and informed by 9,000 surveys and the input of 400 educators.
Yet its credibility now faces scrutiny over references to non-existent films, scholarly articles, and research — some lifted from style guides that explicitly state their examples are fictitious.
Fake citations spark AI debate
Canada’s CBC News and Radio-Canada had carried the first reports of omissions and fictitious sources in the document, noting that educators reviewing the document suspect that the use of generative AI may have resulted in ‘hallucinated’ references being included during preparation.
One infamous example was a citation for a National Film Board production “Schoolyard Games” (2008), which both the film board and academic sources confirmed never existed.
Josh Lepawsky, a former Memorial University Faculty Association president, has noted: “Errors happen. Created citations are a completely different matter that undermines the credibility of the material,” warning that this breaches basic scholarly standards.
Education Minister Bernard Davis has responded that only about 15 out of nearly 450 total citations were found to be fraudulent, labeling the mistakes as “disheartening” but asserting that they have had no influence on the report’s policy recommendations. Davis has further denied any direct AI involvement, calling the idea “preposterous”, although his lack of clarity on how such references were inserted has only deepened doubts among educators and journalists.
An ironic sign of the times
The 10-year roadmap outlined in the document is meant to promote digital literacy, responsible technology use, and privacy awareness as core goals for learners in Newfoundland and Labrador’s schools.
Critics now say that the presence of fabricated citations within the document undermine these very goals, modeling the very hazards of misinformation and false credibility that responsible digital citizenship aims to correct.
The people responsible for the errors have promised to review and amend the affected sections, while defenders of the report say the problematic citations represent a small fraction of an otherwise comprehensive, well-researched document.
However, teachers’ organizations and academic critics argue that any instance of fabricated evidence — whether by human error or automated tools — calls into question the seriousness with which technology’s risks are being addressed in public sector governance.
